A conversation with Scythian band member Daniel Federyko

The summer festival season is now well underway, with hundreds of thousands of people gathering at the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee or the Coachella Festival, near Los Angeles. But the festival that kicks off the season is MerleFest, the annual bluegrass and Americana festival that attracted more than 76,000 people back in March to the Appalachian foothills in North Carolina. MerleFest was founded in 1988, and it has nurtured several generations of performers. One of the bands fostered at MerleFest is Scythian. Warren Cole Smith sat down at MerleFest with one of the band’s founders, Daniel Federyko, to discuss their music and their philosophy of performing.